April 17–June 6, 2026
The three paintings in Lodos’s sleek new white cube, all titled Unfurled (2026), seem at first to disclose nothing of themselves other than their beauty—and that is the point. These large, disk-shaped linen canvases, colored using the famously inexact method of tie-dying, are precisely centripetal, the color gradients lush and sophisticated, the gestures a perfect combination of crisp lines and blurred, stroke-like marks. That no paint was applied by brush makes them technically impressive. It feels crass to compare them to Damien Hirst’s much uglier spin paintings, but it is possible to imagine them mingling with Frank Stella’s or Sol LeWitt’s experimental wall works.
A clue about who, and what, these works address appears in the cryptic press release, which includes an epigraph from Marx (“The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present”) itself taken from a Michael Fried text about the work of Morris Louis, who also titled a series of paintings “Unfurled.” Louis also mastered diluted colors applied without brushes in swathes over the canvas, and some of the pieces from his “Floral” and “Aleph” series flirted with centripetal compositions, bands of bright colors sprouting from the center. But the exhibition is not really a love letter to a well-liked US formalist. If anything, it is a critical reading of a time period: the postwar era that saw the creation of a new American art, and the geopolitical objectives that shaped the conditions of its birth. The press release dedicates a short initial paragraph to the aerial warfare of World War II, and how it changed the ways humans saw the world. Reading it, Barker’s circles come into focus as representations of this bird’s-eye view: they look like abstracted (and prettier) versions of a radar’s interface reading a piece of victimizable territory, or a mushroom cloud seen from above.
The research-based, politically minded mode currently popular in Mexico City relies heavily on explanatory videos and extensive documents for its critical effects. Barker’s approach feels, by contrast, closer to a form of special interest, in which the artist fixates on a given subject with a kind of paranoiac sensitivity, producing works that don’t always explicitly betray the motives for their making. His wall works, paintings, and archival photographs, paired with the brief, intriguing press release, raise timely questions as to the influence of the US military industry and its cutting-edge technologies on the art produced under its auspices. The visual technologies that the military develops and advances, after all, have had an enormous impact on how the world is seen and art is made, while the military-industrial complex has produced billionaires, some of whom fund art institutions.
The fourth piece, Display (1941/2026), a highlight of the show, further locks into target. It is a series of confused, intermingling planes: a white skateboard-shaped surface and medium-sized canvas, both affixed to the wall, are covered with squiggly shapes in silver paint and overlapped with irregular segments of steel expanded metal mesh, also painted white and covered in a similar wavy silver pattern. It is a close replica—slightly less saturated—of a display shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in May 1941, as part of an exhibition titled “Britain at War,” a “limited survey of what the artist can do in time of war.” A section of the catalog titled “The Role of the Artist in Camouflage” describes the practice as being in its infancy, the result of the introduction of aerial warfare, and one that requires “the training of the artist, his sensibility to color, his instinctive use of form and space . . . for the role of camoufleur.” By introducing photographs of ruinous Britain, anti-Nazi cartoons, wartime propaganda posters, and military technology into the art museum, the exhibition unsubtly prepared the US art spectator for the imminent reality of conflict.
The camouflage display here copied by Barker was created by Carlus Dyer, an artist, educator, and curator at MoMA who used his artistic sensibility to come up with exhibiting technologies and pictorial strategies put at the service of the war machine. In the postwar era, these became commonplace for artists like Stella, LeWitt, and many others in the nascent US avant-garde—a metaphorical term with roots in the battlefield. Barker’s show begs the question of whether these advancements were influenced at least as much by intelligence, as in the familiar narrative of how the CIA covertly supported Abstract Expressionist artists, as by military tech itself, particularly those products of it aestheticized and exhibited in museums. His approach recalls the connective logic of the conspiratorial mind: all the hints are out in the open, you just need to put them together.
